'It was the public wot won it,' says BBC trustee

So it wasn't the frantic lobbying by the Newspaper Society and the likes of Trinity Mirror chief Sly Bailey that influenced the BBC Trust to block plans to beef up the BBC's websites with video reports. It was the public.
In a letter to MediaGuardian today, Diane Coyle, BBC trustee and chair of the Public Value and Fair Trading Committee, disputes claims made last week by Bectu's Mark Scrimshaw that the BBC Trust was "beholden to commercial interests".
She says of the decision to instruct BBC management to drop plans for a broadband local video service: "The major reason for our decision was the evidence that such a service would not meet the demand for better local news. The public mainly want this news on radio and TV, not via the internet, and we have asked BBC management to bring forward new proposals to meet that demand. In reaching our decision we, of course, took account of representations from existing local media providers, and gave them appropriate weight - as the BBC Charter instructs us to do - but it was the views of the public that carried the day."

Bectu blast for Guardian and BBC Trust

Mark Scrimshaw, chair of broadcasting union Bectu's BBC Division, gives the BBC Trust and The Guardian both barrels today over the Trust's decision to block BBC plans to beef up its local websites with video reports.
Scimshaw, in a letter published in MediaGuardian, claims the Trust "has shown itself to be craven and pusillanimous, more beholden to commercial interests than any idea of public service broadcasting." He doesn't spare The Guardian, arguing it should have declared an interest in its coverage of the story because it is part of Guardian Media Group which owns a string of local papers, including the Manchester Evening News. Scrimshaw adds: "It (The Guardian) represents one of the main players to gain from the lack of competition thus created, and will be able to continue to get away with lamentable quality and exploitative wages and conditions...The losers from all this are staff in English Regions particularly, who will now face swathes of redundancies; and viewers, who will have to put up with the pitiful offerings of local newspapers' online video rather than a BBC alternative."